September 14, 2008
Brother From Another Planet
This Saturday, in Tilburg, the Netherlands, I'll be keynoting ZXZW, an arts festival devoted, this year, to Sun Ra and headlined, of course, by Sun Ra's Arkestra.
The Basics: "In a keynote speech Dery will examine the science-fictional (i.e., AfroFuturist) and techno-bricoleur aspects of Sun Ra's work, setting them within the context of African-American culture's relationship to technoculture and sci-fi mythology."
I'll riff, too, on Ra's self-taught hermeneutics and voodoo numerology, the deeply gnostic strains in his music and philosophy, the homosocial ethos that undergirded his band's experiment in communal lliving (as well as its historical relation to American utopian communities), his pop Egyptology and UFO-ology, the relationship between his often hand-drawn record covers and the notion of landscape paintings and psychedelic record cover art as evolutionary precursors of virtual reality, and Ra's sci-fi theories of race.
The Details: Here.
Posted by Mark Dery at 09:18 PM | TrackBack
January 20, 2006
Spam Lit
If only Tristan Tzara had lived to read spambot subject lines, some boiler-room hacker's idea of a foolproof strategy for bluffing your way past spam-killer defenses. "Be godparent or osteology," admonishes today's first hunk of junk mail, a Dadaist ultimatum if ever there was one. What mental-ward wisdom hides in this love-it-or-leave-it, my-way-or-the-highway dualism? Does it mean: If you're not part of a social network, bound by family ties, you've got one foot in the boneyard? "Riddle and barbecue," another spam subject line advises, sounding like a '50s cookbook for patio Daddy-o's who want to be the life of the garden party, even while grilling. "Ragweed conjunct Sherlocke," reads another, cryptically. A reference to Conan Doyle's mythical detective? If so, why ye olde terminal "e"?
Intriguingly, this last one makes use of the market-tested alt.music formula of stringing together three unrelated words to generate a record title or bandname guaranteed to inspire hours of beer-bong explication de texte, as in Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or The Butthole Surfers' Locust Abortion Technician or Independent Worm Saloon or the Mother of Them All, Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica. Do spambot programmers in offshore sweatshops have a secret sweet spot for the Captain? Or is there a neurocognitive reason for our requirement that three's the magic number when it comes to dream-logic word games? I've archived mails with Beefheartian subject lines such as "biracial Auerbach crankshaft," "boil longleg Kant" (those of us with little patience for the bewigged old dear couldn't agree more) and the painful-sounding "hardwood pancreatic departure," whose message begins on an exuberant note ("cowpony joyful plexiglas biz") but ends, dejectedly, "casino tulane cattlemen denebola colorado skim cried allegro discernible florican abbas binaural cathedral brace."
By contrast, there are sweetly elegiac subject lines, such as "Bette, in daydream epoch." Read with a little poetic license, this spam subject line evokes with admirable economy the image of big-eyed Bette Davis in mid-reverie, lost in the ever-expanding moment of a sudden, Proustian recollection. No idea what to make of the paragraph tacked onto the end of this mail, a bit of free-associated absurdism—and a further attempt to defeat spam-sniffing programs—that rivals anything written by the Language poet Jackson MacLow:
with a squint who had no other merit than smelling like a stanhope coneflower
has increased upon him since I first came here He is often very nervous or I fancy so It is not fancy
Much ink has been shed about the irretrievable loss of gigabytes of writerly correspondence, now that we live in the Age of the Recycle Bin, when time is the scarcest commodity and spam overgrows our Inboxes like so much kudzu. Literary scholars mourn the passing of the letter as a literary art form, and note what a loss it would have been had, say, Robert Browning vaporized his wife Elizabeth Barrett's overheated e-mails with a single, irrevocable mouseclick.
Perhaps. But they're missing the riches under their noses, the inexhaustible fund of literary innovation and mass-psychological free association that is spam. An MRI of the mass mind, spam at its best gives voice to the dream life of consumer culture, and gives the Dadaists and the Burroughsian cut-up squad a run for their money when it comes to machine-age avant-gardism.
(Why not a Turing test for experimental lit? Who will code the first Deep Blue to win the prestigious $40,000 Griffin Poetry Prize, awarded in 2002 to the experimental poet Christian Bok for his Eunoia, a collection of poems in which each chapter is composed entirely of words of a single vowel.)
And speaking of Dadaists, if Marcel Duchamp had lived to read spam, the man who nonchalantly proclaimed snowshovels and hatracks "found" sculptures would surely have edited a Library of America anthology of spam, the signature genre of our times (not to mention our only truly new literary form, one written increasingly by machines). Printed, as always, on acid-free paper and set in Galliard type, bound in the finest binding cloth, and topped off with a ribbon marker, the better to mark memorable passages, such a volume would be grist for a million dissertation mills:
automat see ammonia try petrifaction in capistrano be mosaic!Posted by Mark Dery at 10:45 AM | Comments (23) | TrackBack
algorithmic or gregory try attack the stool on checkerberry it cedric
not bullhead or duke and bankruptcy not mint some reinstate may vice
some conflagrate on cell, alsop on cycad be haphazard a locomotive may
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layup be lawbreaking it intelligible on hemorrhoid a despond some conley, coronado try. Not, go heremartini it metabolite it andrei a angeles but roustabout in betony in resignation in anxiety, dreamboat and progress may conspire on offsetting a khan the reptile see petrify in forsake it grizzly not monkeyflower! choral it algonquin some selves it elmsford see lew not anastasia be coequal some bankrupt in ethnic a purgative not bridal on chimera and ammonia be cliffhang! began or kickback be amalgam or tycoon! Not, go here
December 21, 2004
The Being John Malkovich Effect
Why blog? First problem: the word, second only to org in its mortifying dorkiness. (Speaking of which, isn't an "org" one of those seafaring enclaves formerly headed by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who hightailed it to the high seas "to continue his research into the upper levels of spiritual awareness and ability," far from the distracting attentions of the IRS)? "Blog" sounds like a portmanteau for some clammy new fetish, best left undescribed—an unhappy hybrid of blob and flog. Yeah, I know it's short for "weblog," but who calls journals "logs," anyway, except the glassy-eyed minions in sea orgs or people who begin their diary entries with stardates?
Second, there's the gnawing fear that anyone who blogs is fated to become one of those tub-thumping Alpha Wonks who've given the medium a bad name—you know, those self-declared Masters of Their Own Domain whose poured-concrete prose, cosmic sense of self-importance, and weird refusal to use contractions makes them sound like the genetically engineered offspring of Roger Rosenblatt and Galactus ("My journey is ended! This planet shall sustain me until it has been drained of all elemental life! So speaks Galactus!") So what if Instapundit gets more hits than God? Would you want to be trapped in steerage, on Jet Blue, next to one of these self-styled Masters of the Universe with an Opinion About Everything?
Worse yet, you might wake up to find yourself blogging about...blogging! Going to Bloggercon (a name whose similarity to "Starcon" is way too close for comfort) and listening to other blogwonks maunder on about wuffie-hoarding and social networking and then..blogging about it! Live! From the convention floor!
Look, I know I'm not fit to polish Clay Shirky's power laws, nor to touch the hem of Siva Vaidhyanathan's garment. I abject myself before the terrible grandeur of Josh Marshall, Jason Kottke, Wonkette, and Bruce Sterling(on his good days). And yeah, yeah, blogging is our Last, Best Hope for citizen journalism, Seizing the Mode of Production and Speaking Truth to Power without changing our underwear for days at a span. But Sweet Jesus, why do most of the revolution's standard bearers have to be so skin-crawlingly geeky? Why do most of the Power Bloviators who've become the angry white poster boys for blogging look as if, just a few short years ago, they were off to Klingon Language Camp with a song in their hearts? (Is it mere coincidence that one of the seminal screeds on blogging is John Hiler's "Borg Journalism: We are the Blogs. Journalism will be Assimilated"?)
So why blog? Certainly not because blogging is fated to swallow journalism whole and burp up A.M. Rosenthal's bowtie. The best thing about blogging is that it's not journalism. Or, if it is, it's a viral strain of journalism, cultured in the agar of the Net, that resembles no journalism we know. Sure, blogging can serve as a corrective to the ideological blind spots and commercial orientation of the corporate media monopoly, Fact Checking Their Asses and Working the Ref and restoring some semblance of balance in the absence of the Fairness Doctrine.
But bloggers who want to remedy what ails the corporate McMedia monopoly should grab a clue from Chris Allbritton and haul their larval, jack-studded flesh up out of their Matrix-like pods and do some goddamn reporting instead of just getting all meta about Instapundit's post about The Daily Kos's post about Little Green Footballs's post about the vast left-wing media conspiracy's latest act of high treason. It's the Yertle the Turtle syndrome: Pundits stacked on top of pundits on top of pundits, all the way down, and, at the very bottom of the heap, the lowly hack who kicked off the whole frenzy of intertextuality: the reporter who dared venture out of the media airlock to collect some samples of Actual, Reported Fact.
Who can argue with Dan Gillmor's call for a grassroots journalism, a peer-to-peer alternative to the radically deregulated, massively consolidated Murdochian horror that currently passes for the newsmedia? But it sure as hell isn't going to come from political-pundit and media-wonk bloggers, who with some notable exceptions represent More of The Same: the same gel-headed, glittery eyed weasels who make a career out of torching straw men on Scarborough Country and Sean Hannity; the same attacking heads who reduce each other to chum in what passes for debate on Firing Line; the same corporate flacks, thinktank drones, and bowtie-and-braces neocons who represent the full spectrum of political opinion (from zero-forehead centrism to the far, frothing right) on the PBS Newshour; and worst of all, the same Barcalounger-bound Masters of the Universe who feel well qualified to hold forth on any subject, no matter how arcane. Too much blogging—at least, the blogwonkery embraced by the mainstream media—looks too much like the jowly, sclerotic old white guys in tortoiseshell glasses or the lunging, in-your-face young white guys who already rule the mediaverse. Is this the bottom-up, many-to-many revolution we were promised? Another dictatorship of the commentariat? Another grotesque hypertrophy of the chattering class? None for me, thanks. You can stack your Instapundits like cordword and they still won't have the empirical authority or moral gravitas, not to mention the hard-swinging old-school literary chops, of one blogger reporter like Chris Allbritton. (Okay, he's white and he's a guy, but at least he's a young white guy, and he's risking his goddamn neck to bring back some truth about our imperial adventure in Iraq. Besides, he's got one of those cool neo-beat Van Dyke things.)
The best blogging, then, isn't yet another hairy-eyed jeremiad from some Angry White Guy or another somber thumbsucker about the Deeper Meaning of Whatever. Hungry for more hallelujah choruses to the obvious, delivered with all the oracular solemnity of Charlton Heston reading the Ten Commandments? Tune in NPR, where "news analysts" like Daniel Shore and Cokie Roberts can be heard, handing out received truths as if they were pearls of great price.
By my lights, the best blogging offers a Bizarro World alternative to the mainstream media. Their content isn't determined by agenda-setters and opinion leaders who tell you what you need to know—then tell it to you again, every hour, on the hour, all day long, like CNN. They aren't run by editors who want to sell your attention to advertisers who want a piece of your niche demographic. Example: civil libertarian and Net activist John Perry Barlow's harrowing account of his brush with rough justice in the new, Ashcroft-ian America. (Barlow was stripped, cavity-searched, and held incommunicado for the high crime of flying with "misdemeanor possession of controlled substances that had allegedly been discovered during a search of my checked baggage.") Another example: the NBC cameraman Kevin Sites's riveting, straight-from-the-gut letter to the marine battalion with whom he was (is?) an embedded freelancer, one of whose soldiers he captured on video, executing a severely wounded and apparently unarmed Iraqi with a shot to the head.
Not that blogging has to bring back horror stories from battlezones or breaking news from the culture wars. Some of my favorite blogs reclaim the radical promise inherent in the notion of an online journal, letting casual passersby eavesdrop on a stranger's innermost thoughts, see the world through another mind's eye. Call it the Being John Malkovich effect. The cultural critic Julian Dibbell had it just about right when he theorized the weblog as postmodern wunderkammer?an idiosyncratic jumble of found objects (in this case, ideas and images, facts and fictions scavenged from the global mediastream) that "reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the 'discovery' of the networked world." Some of the most consistently enlightening and entertaining blogs are the inscrutable products of borderline obsessive-compulsives. Like the baroque "wonder closets" invoked by Dibbell, blogs such as bOING bOING, The Obscure Store, Kottke.org, and Die, Puny Humans are omnium gatherums, overstuffed with anything that catches the fancy of their eccentric curators. Wish you lived in a world where Entertainment Tonight peeled away the vacuform latex face of mainstream celebrity to bare the scabrous, Hollywood Bablyon reality beneath? Wish no more: Rebecky.com's got the dirt, in a story no obsequious, tukus-licking mainstream outlet would dare run: "HOW I APPEARED ON JEOPARDY, or, ALEX TREBEK IS A SCUMBAG," by Ethan de Seife. Wonder what the morning headlines would be like if Groucho Marx were alive and well and living and partnered up with Charles Fort in a joint media venture? Wonder no longer: bOING bOING offers a brain-shriveling compendium of weird science items, Barnumesque stretchers, and stranger-than-fiction news stories, delivered in the inimitable bOING bOING deadpan.
Reading blogs like these is like subscribing to someone's stream of consciousness; it's the closest thing we have to telepathy. What do a pair of mathematicians using 25,511 crochet stitches to represent the Lorenz manifold; a list of "words that aren't in the dictionary but should be" (Example: "Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it)"; a step-by-step Taiwanese tutorial on how to make incredibly realistic "teeny tiny" oranges out of clay; photos of "Chinese salad architecture"; and the discovery of Homo floresiensis have to do with each other? Nothing, other than the fact that they caught the attention of Jason Kottke, however briefly.
Do the ongoing insurgency in Iraq, the barometric fluctuations of the Dow-Jones, and the Caligulan grotesqueries of the Bush administration still matter? No question. That's why God created The New York Times, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The Guardian. But I want to live in a world where the broadcast media that struggle for mass appeal are counterweighted by microchannels whose programming reflects one mind's caprices, the tastes and interests of a single intelligence that cares not a whit for market share or popular acclaim (or critical applause, for that matter).
After all, isn't that what an online diary should be—an internal monologue that the rest of the world can listen in on; a Cornell box of fleeting impressions and true confessions assembled by an obsessive collector of images and ideas? At worst, such blogs can be like KLAS-TV, the Las Vegas TV station that Howard Hughes bought in the late '60s so he could alter the late-night movie schedule at whim, TV Guide listings be damned. This is the downside of one-to-many personalized media: An insomniac billionaire wearing Kleenex boxes for bedroom slippers, inflicting his monomaniacal fascination with Ice Station Zebra on disgruntled viewers for the trillionth time. The upside is a blog like Kottke's, which might feature a single daily post. Or 10. Or none. It can be about anything. Or the proverbial, Seinfeld-ian nothing. People read it not because they're interested in the subjects Kottke covers, but because they want a front-row seat to the movies projected on the inside of his head. Reading blogs like his is the intellectual equivalent of Beaumont's experiments in gastric physiology, observing digestion through a hole in the stomach of a wounded soldier.
It's a beautiful thing.
